Dear Editor,
John Quick’s July 11 column, entitled “Understanding Terror’s True Human Cost Could Bring Peace, ” is quick to play on emotion and slow on facts in trying to express his opinion.
We go to Israel regularly on humanitarian missions and first-hand experience the actual facts. What Quick seems ignorant of is the fact that the vast majority of Palestinian children are brought up from infancy to hate Israel while Israeli children are brought up to respect life. We have visited the main hospital where victims of terror (no matter whether Arab, Muslim, Christian or Jews) are treated. We have witnessed Arab ambulances bringing their people to the emergency room and Jewish doctors and nurses rushing to help them. We have met with the Orthodox Jewish volunteers of Zaka who have told us the stories of bringing wounded PA terrorists in Zaka ambulances to Jewish hospitals to be treated while their own family members were killed in the Palestinian terrorist’s partially detonated bombing.
Quick’s statistical analysis of Israeli and Palestinian deaths is deceptive. He fails to mention that the numbers of Palestinian deaths given lump combatants in with noncombatants, suicide bombers with innocent civilians, and report Palestinian “collaborators” murdered by their own compatriots as if they had been killed by Israel. Â
Quick stated that Israel was created by terrorism. The facts are as follows:Â
- There is a continuous connection for almost 4,000 years between the Jewish people and the Land of Israel.
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Despite the conquest by the Romans and the ascendancy of Christianity, Jewish communities in Palestine survived two thousand years of exile.
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Following World War I and the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, the British Balfour Declaration recognized the validity of the ancient claim by the Jews to a national home in Palestine.
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Violence toward Jews by Arabs in Palestine erupted repeatedly in the early 20th century. Various Arab leaders and states collaborated with Nazi-fascist states, particularly in regard to their actions toward Jews in Palestine before and during World War II.
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The United Nations Partition Plan of 1947 subdivided the established Jewish and Arab entities in segments each approximately 10 percent of the original mandate.
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Prior to 1948 the Jews in Palestine were known as Palestinian, while the Arabs refused the name Palestinian in favor of Ottoman, then Syrian. In reality there is no separate Arab ethnic group as Palestinian.
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The Jews accepted the U.N. plan. The Arabs rejected it, told the Arab population to leave the area while the Arabs destroy Israel and the result was Arabs putting their own people in “refugee camps” to use as a political pawn.
The Arab-Israeli conflict is a tragedy that must be stopped and the truth must be told! I hope Quick will do more research in the future.
D. Allen, Morgan Hill
